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Reflection for the Masses? Charlotte Herzeel, Pascal Costanza, and Theo D'Hondt Vrije Universiteit Brussel [email protected] Abstract. A reflective programming language provides means to render explicit what is typically abstracted away in its language constructs in an on-demand style. In the early 1980's, Brian Smith introduced a gen- eral recipe for building reflective programming languages with the notion of procedural reflection. It is an excellent framework for understanding and comparing various metaprogramming and reflective approaches, in- cluding macro programming, first-class environments, first-class contin- uations, metaobject protocols, aspect-oriented programming, and so on. Unfortunately, the existing literature of Brian Smith's original account of procedural reflection is hard to understand: It is based on terminology derived from philosophy rather than computer science, and takes con- cepts for granted that are hard to reconstruct without intimate knowl- edge of historical Lisp dialects from the 1960's and 1970's. We attempt to untangle Smith's original account of procedural reflection and make it accessible to a new and wider audience. On the other hand, we then use its terminological framework to analyze other metaprogramming and reflective approaches, especially those that came afterwards. 1 Introduction Programming languages make programming easier because they provide an ab- stract model of computers. For example, a Lisp or Smalltalk programmer does not think of computers in terms of clock cycles or transistors, but in terms of a virtual machine that understands s-expressions, and performs evaluation and function application, or understands class hierarchies, and performs mes- sage sending and dynamic dispatch. The implementation of the particular pro- gramming language then addresses the actual hardware: It is the interpreter or compiler that translates the language to the machine level. Programming languages do not only differ in the programming models they provide (functional, object-oriented, logic-based, multi-paradigm, and so on), but also in fine-grained design choices and general implementation strategies. These differences involve abstractions that are implemented as explicit language constructs, but also \hidden" concepts that completely abstract away from cer- tain implementation details. For example, a language may or may not abstract away memory management through automatic garbage collection, may or may ? In: R. Hirschfeld and K. Rose (Eds.): S3 2008, LNCS 5146, pp. 87{122, 2008. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008. not support recursion, may or may not abstract away variable lookup through lexical scoping, and so on. The implementation details of features like garbage collection, recursion and lexical scoping are not explicitly mentioned in programs and are thus said to be absorbed by the language [1]. Some languages absorb less and reveal more details about the internal workings of their implementation (the interpreter, the compiler or ultimately the hardware) than others. We know that all computational problems can be expressed in any Turing- complete language, but absorption has consequences with regard to the way we think about and express solutions for computational problems. While some kinds of absorption are generally considered to have strong advantages, it is also obvious that some hard problems are easier to solve when one does have con- trol over the implementation details of a language. For example, declaring weak references tells the otherwise invisible garbage collector to treat certain objects specially, using the cut operator instructs Prolog to skip choices while otherwise silently backtracking, and first-class continuations enable manipulating the oth- erwise implicit control flow in Scheme. When designing a programming language, choosing which parts of the implementation model are or are not absorbed is about finding the right balance between generality and conciseness [2], and it is hard to determine what is a good balance in the general case. A reflective programming language provides means to render explicit what is being absorbed in an on-demand style. To support this, it is equipped with a model of its own implementation, and with constructs for explicitly manipulating that implementation. This allows the programmer to change the very model of the programming language from within itself! In a way, reflection strips away a layer of abstraction, bringing the programmer one step closer to the actual machine. However, there is no easy escape from the initially chosen programming model and its general implementation strategy: For example, it is hard to turn an object-oriented language into a logic language. Rather think of the programmer being able to change the fine-grained details. For example, one can define versions of an object-oriented language with single or multiple inheritance, with single or multiple dispatch, with or without specific scoping rules, and so on. In the literature, it is said that a reflective language is an entire region in the design space of languages rather than a single, fixed language [3]. In order to support reflective programming, the implementation of the pro- gramming language needs to provide a reflective architecture. In the beginning of the 1980's, Smith et al. introduced procedural reflection, which is such a re- flective architecture that introduces the essential concepts for building reflective programming languages. Since the introduction of procedural reflection, many people have used, refined and extended these concepts for building their own re- flective programming languages. As such, understanding procedural reflection is essential for understanding and comparing various metaprogramming and reflec- tive approaches, including macro programming, first-class environments, first- class continuations, metaobject protocols, aspect-oriented programming, and so on. Unfortunately, the existing literature of Smith's original account of proce- dural reflection is hard to understand: It is based on terminology derived from Syntactic Domain Structural Field Real World <float> 5.0 'five' <function call> (+ 23 (+ 10 9)) 'forty-two' <float> (lambda (x) 'increment (+ 1 x)) function' <function call> <closure> "john" <['j, 'o, 'h, 'n]> Internalization Normalization Denotation Fig. 1. Smith's theory of computation. philosophy rather than computer science, and takes concepts known in the Lisp community in the 1960's and 1970's for granted that are hard to reconstruct without intimate knowledge of historical Lisp dialects. In this paper, we report on our own attempt to untangle and reconstruct the original account of procedural reflection. Our approach was to actually reim- plement a new interpreter for 3-Lisp, using Common Lisp as a modern imple- mentation language. In our work, we also build upon experiences and insights that came after the introduction of procedural reflection in [1], and also add some refinements based on our own insights. Additionally we use the concepts introduced by procedural reflection to analyze various other metaprogramming and reflective approaches, especially those that came after Smith's conception of procedural reflection. 2 Self representation for a programming language By introducing procedural reflection, Smith introduced a general framework for adding reflective capabilities to programming languages. In order to turn a pro- gramming language into a reflective version, one must extend the language with a model of the same language's implementation. That self representation must be causally connected to the language's implementation: When we manipulate the self representation, this should be translated into a manipulation of the real implementation. What parts of the implementation are possibly relevant to in- clude in the model can by large be derived from mapping the non-reflective version of the programming language to Smith's theory of computation. 2.1 A model of computation According to Smith [1], computation can be modeled as a relational mapping between three distinct domains: a syntactic domain, an internal representational domain (the structural field) and the \real world". The syntactic domain consists of program source code. The structural field consists of all runtime entities that make up the language implementation. In extremis, this includes the electrons and molecules of the hardware on which the interpreter runs. However, for the purpose of procedural reflection, the structural field typically consists of high- level data structures for implementing the values native to the programming language, such as numbers, characters, functions, sequences, strings, and so on. The real world consists of natural objects and abstract concepts that program- mers and users want to refer to in programs, but that are typically out of reach of a computer. Fig. 1 shows a graphical representation for computation as a mapping from programs, to their internal representation, to their meaning in the real world. The three labelled boxes represent each of the domains. The collection of arrows depict the mapping. The figure is meant to represent a model for computation rendered by a Lisp interpreter, written in C { hence the s-expressions as example elements of the syntactic domain. The <type> notation is used to denote an instance of a particular C type or struct. For example, the \number 5" is written as \5.0" in the programming language. Internally, it is represented by a C value of type float and it means, as to be expected,
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